I accidentally clicked on the Excel link on Ravelry’s stash page today, and out of a desperate need to avoid the analysis of yet another Latin proximity search, I went with it.

33,000. Yards. In. My. Stash.

That is a scary number. How long does it take to knit that much? I also can’t decide if it’s good or bad that about 29K of that yardage is lace or fingering weight yarn.

My coping mechanism* has been to push myself to reach the end of a large seemingly-neverending project in hopes that the cessation of said project will alleviate my stash-induced panic.

Looky! I’m well into (by which I really mean, “I’m halfway done with row 1 of”) the very last chart of Icarus. Of course, I’ve been spending so much time immersed in the world of written-record-as-prescriptive-text that I’m beginning to question my motives for starting Icarus in the first place. When all you can think about is whether records of the past (mythological or otherwise) were written in order to influence the future, is it really wise to knit a shawl designed in honor of some dumb kid who thought wax was an effective fixative for the only thing standing between him and a badly planned base-jumping experiment? That thought, too, is scary….

But not scary enough to stop me from wearing it as soon as it’s done, and if the echoes of a potential disaster of mythological proportions aren’t enough to scare me, neither are the scalding summer forecasts appearing on the horizon.

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* OK, my knitting-based coping mechanism, ’cause one look at the sum cell in that Excel doc drove me to write obsessively for several hours in an effort not to think about the sheer yardage of yarn in the next room…. Procrastination is a curious phenomenon.